It is much easier to sell Look what I did for you than Look what I avoided for you.
It is generally accepted that harm from doctors—not including risks from hospital germs—accounts for more deaths than any single cancer.
It is as if we are doomed to be deceived by the most superficial part of things, the packaging, the gift wrapping. This is why we don’t see antifragility in places that are obvious, too obvious. It is...
It hit me right there and then that these antifragile hormetic responses were just a form of redundancy, and all the ideas of Mother Nature converged in my mind. It is all about redundancy. Nature lik...
Indeed, Georges Simenon, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, only wrote sixty days a year, with three hundred days spent doing nothing. He published more than two hundred novels...
In the complex world, the notion of cause itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes fo...
In that sense the description coming from journalism is certainly not just an unrealistic representation of the world but rather the one that can fool you the most by grabbing your attention via your...
In short, the fragilista (medical, economic, social planning) is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects pot...
In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic (the entrepreneur...
In his book The Nature of Rationality he gets, as is typical with philosophers, into amateur evolutionary arguments and writes the following: Since not more than 50 percent of the individuals can be w...
In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observation...
In addition, there seems to be curious evidence of a link between leadership and a form of psychopathology (the sociopath) that encourages the nonblinking, self-confident, insensitive person to rally...
In a thick and captivating book, La rebellion française, the historian Jean Nicolas shows how the culture of rioting was extremely sophisticated—historically, it counts as the true French national spo...
Imagine going to Mexico with a notebook and trying to figure out the average wealth of the population from talking to people you randomly encounter. Odds are that, without Carlos Slim in your sample,...
Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop...
If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.
If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.
If you are looking for your misplaced wallet in your living room, in a trial and error mode, you exercise rationality by not looking in the same place twice. In
If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own....
If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit.